Chrysalis
by NinthFeather
Summary: Amia Lee woke up, afterward. And maybe it was just a symptom of shock, but she really, really thought people ought to be a little more freaked out by that fact.
_A/N: For the Gundam 00 Week Day 6 prompt "Innovades/Innovators"_

 _Amia Lee is the girl from the middle of A Wakening of the Trail Blazer who gets partially crystalized by the ELS and then taken to the Earth Sphere Forces scientists for study. She's also shown briefly at the end of the movie, with a body that is ELS-like and metallic in areas, on the Innovator space shuttle._

 _Spoilers for A Wakening of the Trail Blazer, obviously. Also a strong warning for body horror on this one. Proceed with caution/skip the first four paragraphs if that's not your thing._

 **Chrysalis**

She woke up, afterward. And maybe it was just a symptom of shock, but she really, really thought people ought to be a little more freaked out by that fact.

Because the last thing she remembered, from before, was a smiling green-haired man with a slasher smile and cold, cold eyes shambling toward her, and she'd seen this zombie movie before so she ran like Death itself was on her heels.

And then it had grabbed her and things got kind of fuzzy from there because that vague buzzy headache she'd had all day had suddenly turned into a shrieking storm of white noise in her head. She kind of remembered lurching backward. She definitely remembered the part when there was this odd feeling down to her bones, like the twist of a bad cramp but tinged with a sense of indelible wrongness that she couldn't articulate. And then her hand went not-quite-numb—feeling was still there, but it was far off and distorted and hard to catch. But there was still a slow, dull ache when the crystals started growing. It only got worse as they spread to the more tender areas—her wrist, the inside of her elbow, her armpit, each throbbed just a little more than the last. And that was about when she really realized that it wasn't just that her arm was being turned into crystals, it was that she was being turned into crystals, her whole being, there would be nothing at all left when it was done—and primal horror filled her, almost loud enough to drown out the white-noise screaming in her mind. Almost.

Not quite, though, and as the crystals engulfed her, it changed—there was more sharpness to it, something that wasn't just discomfort and formless noise. Something like images? She remembered wishing she could just make them out, even as the crystals engulfed half her field of vision—she very carefully did not think about what that meant for her eye, _no no no no no_ _ **STOP**_ —and the resulting stab of barely-dulled pain finally stole consciousness away from her.

She didn't expect to wake up again. She did anyway.

Well, kind of. The human known as Amia Lee never woke up again, but in her place was an entirely inhuman creature, an Innovator-ELS hybrid that could sort of pass for normal with a lot of makeup but would never be _anything_ resembling that again as long as she lived.

Which was predicted to be a very long time, though no-one knew for certain.

Before all of this, Amia had been planning to study to be a doctor. She liked helping people, but she also wanted an intellectual challenge—and her parents, of course, were utterly on board, and had been bragging to all of their friends since she was in middle school about her chosen career path. But she'd always been a little divided about her specialty. Some days, she'd thought she wanted to go into pediatrics, and get on a path that would end with her in a job where seeing little kids smiling at her every day was part of the routine. Other days, that sounded a little too boring, and she thought she'd prefer to just jump into the cutting edge of whatever field most needed exploration when she went into medical school, write a couple dozen papers, and put herself on a fast track to being that person on the news who has the word "expert" under their names.

Becoming a cutting-edge medical anomaly kind of made that decision for her.

As of Amia's awakening, there had only been two Innovators in the history of the planet. Her doctor implied there was a third, but that he was being kept classified for security reasons. But—two officially documented Innovators, total. Both unavailable for further study, since one was dead and the other off-planet. Moreover, both were male, combat-trained, and roughly the same age.

That was nowhere _near_ enough data.

So, she requested what data they did have, and, right there in the Earth Sphere Federation research facility where she woke up, she started working.

Sure, she was only in high school. But the other scientists were busy working on the aftermath of the ELS and the samples they still had. They weren't worried about the Innovators, much less any other Innovator-ELS hybrids that might show up.

Amia was. More so after she read between the lines of Descartes Shaman's records and realized he'd been little more than a glorified guinea pig. Amia didn't want that; she wouldn't accept that. So she started acting like one of the assistant scientists, fetching coffee and paperwork and doing other little menial tasks. Acting like one of them, instead of a patient, so when the time came they'd be asking to hire her instead of deciding to keep her for further study.

All the while, she was making a list of the things they needed to know. Most of the "data" on Innovators was actually based on Innovades, which wasn't very useful—everyone acknowledged there were differences between the two, but until they knew what _all_ of those differences were, assuming that what was true of one was true of the other was making a big jump.

Some of it was—the ability to interface with quantum computers, at least. Amia couldn't _test_ the telepathy, being the only Innovator within any kind of range, but she suspected that applied too. It didn't work between Innovators and Innovades though, or at least it didn't for her. That was another problem. She wasn't exactly the ideal subject, since she didn't know which aspects of her abilities were ELS-derived and which ones were a result of being an Innovator, unless there was record of either pure ELS or True Innovators having them.

Besides, there were things she couldn't test alone, and wouldn't want to anyway. _Someone_ was going to have to figure out if Innovators could reproduce normally, either with one another or normal humans, and since neither Shaman nor Seiei had attempted to produce offspring, the task belonged to a future Innovator. _Not_ Amia—she was still in high school, had no boyfriend, and besides, the ELS hybrid genetics would probably throw off the results.

Someone was going to have to figure out the limits of their speed, their strength—and _not_ just when they were combat-trained men in their twenties. Amie herself felt stronger, more agile, but she'd never done anything more strenuous than gym class. Would that affect the degree of enhancement she experienced? What about older Innovators? Ones with physical disabilities? _Would_ physically disabled people become Innovators? If so, would it happen at a lower or higher rate than the rest of the population, and would it affect their disabilities?

There was so much they didn't know about Innovators and the way their bodies worked.

And then there was Amia herself. Every morning she looked in the mirror and her own appearance unsettled her—her face was a patchwork of healthy skin, slightly pinkish from her morning shower's steam, on one side and washed-out grayscale on the other. Part of her just couldn't shake the instinct that said _skin isn't supposed to be that color._

She wasn't an Innovator—well, she wasn't only an Innovator. She was half-Innovator, half alien infection survivor, and her hair on one side was actually crystalline in structure if she looked at the strands under a microscope. When she accidentally cut that side's arm on something, it bled grey, too, but only as long as she was looking at the cut. As soon as she got distracted, the cut closed itself and the "blood" sank back into her skin. She was something not-quite-human and if the ESF scientists ever got too interested, she'd be Descartes Shaman's unwilling successor.

But if she played her cards right—if she researched and trained and made connections with the right doctors, instead, she'd pull off that old plan of hers, _years_ early.

She _was_ the cutting edge medical field, the first documentable female Innovator, and she was planning to be the one to provide medical treatment to all the rest who came after her.

She just had to learn as much as she could about how to do it right, first.

 _A/N: The only canon things about this fic are the bits that match what's in the author's note, and the existence of Descartes Shaman and Setsuna. We have so little detail about Amia and really any of the other Innovators after Setsuna and Descartes (who were both 1) frontline fighters and 2) pieces of work) and I can't help but be curious about them and their experiences and the cultural fallout of their development. Also, I have a lot of feelings about Descartes's implied and shown treatment by the ESF and they boil down to "That's really horrid."_

 _All of the stuff about Amia's physiology and her background, though, that's all just me speculating. Actually, some of the stuff I made up for this story might eventually be the basis for an original story someday—the idea of a panicked person with new superhuman abilities deciding to or even being forced to science them instead of go save people because they don't know what their body is doing and they don't want to trust other people to do said science is pretty intriguing to me._

 _Tumblr's i-want-to-believe gets a lot of credit for the existence of this thing, because she convinced me to watch A Wakening of the Trail Blazer and then streamed it with me. saji-crossroad's set of AotT screenshots were also partially responsible—I saw the set labelled "Amia Lee" and searched her on the Gundam Wiki, which led to plotbunnies._


End file.
